In this super-informative interview, Meyar Sheik, CEO, and Co-Founder of Certona speaks to MarTech Advisor about the value of treating each customer as a unique individual and personalizing their customer experience. Read on for valuable, actionable tips, particularly for retail marketers.

What evolution have you seen amongst marketers when it comes to the true personalization of CX?

Marketers have adopted cutting-edge technologies that enable data-driven, contextually relevant, individualized Customer Experiences. Most recently, a significant evolution we’ve seen is the implementation of AI-powered technologies that enable marketers to understand the massive amounts of data identifying segments at an individual level, enabling one-to-one marketing.

Marketers can now use AI to deliver increasingly targeted campaigns through predictive promotions and offers, autonomous optimization and connecting the data points across the customer’s journey to create a fully orchestrated experience.

What typical mistakes do you see being made by large enterprise-size marketers when it comes to personalization?

In an oversaturated market, shoppers are inundated with noise from competing brands trying to sell products and services. Marketers who use personalization strategies to cut through the noise can win shoppers’ business through individualized experiences tailored to their needs. Personalization strategies drive higher results from marketing campaigns and expand customer lifetime value.

Similarly, what are the missed opportunities for mid-to-smaller companies when it comes to optimizing outcomes from an investment in personalization?

Mid-to-small sized companies need to think about how they can leverage data to deliver a predictive and individualized experience.

For example, leveraging online shopper data to improve email communications with relevant content creates a more impactful experience. Marketers can deliver more relevant promotions and offers to retain shoppers as part of their community and encourage them to return to the site. In addition, leveraging online shopper behaviors such as cart or browse abandonment to trigger real-time remarketing campaigns enables marketers to personalize the communications with the most relevant offers, content and product suggestions.

Marketers are realizing that defining CX has to be based on the customer’s unique journey and behavior. What are your top tips to practically connect the customer’s journey to the CX?

The customer’s journey with a retailer ultimately becomes their experience. If the journey is difficult, it will affect the customer’s experience, and therefore make or break whether they return to the retailer, or recommend them.

Firstly, remember each shopper is an individual, so treat them that way. Leverage real-time shopper behaviors to understand what their unique intent is so you can deliver an individualized experience.

It would seem that e-tailers would want customers to spend maximum time on their site – yet the entire engagement piece has to be omnichannel – across a range of platforms that may or may not even belong to the brand. How should an e-commerce marketer approach this challenge?

What’s important here is to have an active, engaging presence across all channels, and to ensure these are linked by relevant, regularly updated content. For those channels which are owned by a retailer – i.e., web, mobile, email, contact center and in-store – businesses can go one step further and personalize a whole range of assets to enrich engagement. Implementing data analytics solutions across your entire IT stack (which encompasses all of these touchpoints) allows retailers to personalize product recommendations, content, special offers, ads and more.

This means that whichever platform or channels a shopper is using, their experience is carefully curated to appeal to their preferences and taste – again, this is down to intelligent data management. A retailer can leverage historic data on that same shopper’s browsing and purchase behavior on a desktop, and combine it with real-time data they have on the shopper’s location when they switch to shopping on their mobile. This can deliver granular insight, and prompt action: the retailer delivers a push notification via mobile, highlighting a special offer in a store nearby.

We can even take this one step further to ensure that the dots are joined between every platform – physical or digital. When the shopper goes into the store and buys the item on offer, the data is logged at the point of sale, and this can then be used to help build a greater profile of the individual. Instead of this information remaining siloed at brick-and-mortar checkouts, it can be used to deliver an enhanced, tailored, cohesive experience across channels. Say the shopper bought a pair of jeans in-store, they might then get home to an email recommending a white shirt and a belt to complement the purchase.

What are the key considerations for personalization on mobile? Is it very different from personalization on the web?

The mobile shopper expects the same personalized experience on their mobile device as they would on a desktop. Therefore retailers need to ensure that both their mobile sites and apps are optimized to ease product discovery and increase sales conversions.

The mobile interface is smaller than that of desktop or laptop computer. Therefore a retailer’s personalization strategy should ensure they’re making the most of the limited space they have, by promoting personalized products directly on the home page, encouraging shoppers to immediately engage with the site.

Mobile devices also enable a number of other services such as user-friendly applications, push-notifications, and geo-location marketing. Mobile users no longer just browse online; they’re able to use their devices as a portable wallet, to pay, or for scanning barcodes within the store.

How can marketers take ‘personalization’ beyond just product or content recommendations?

Personalization is more than just product and content recommendations, it’s a business strategy that provides the ability to understand shoppers as individuals and mold the entire experience around them to drive more revenue.

Personalization helps marketers understand shopper affinities around communications, site preferences, and tailored promotions and offers. This becomes increasingly important as marketers are tasked with improving a customer’s lifetime value; personalized messaging based on shopper data is therefore key. Companies can also increase revenue by identifying which channels customers prefer the most, and shift spends accordingly.

What would be the best ways for a marketer to demonstrate ROI on personalization or attribute performance outcomes directly to personalization investments?

Marketers need to track and test online and offline campaigns to assess performance and look for improvements. The best way a retailer can demonstrate the ROI it’s getting from its personalization strategy is to test audiences and analyze the engagement metrics, conversion rates, average order value, and average cart values.

How important are Customer Data Platforms or similar solutions for stitching together a unified view of the customer?

The power of personalization lies in the ability to understand the shopper and anticipate their needs – which is only achieved through a centralized source of unified data. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) is currently being hailed as the gold standard of data integration – one that makes sophisticated, hyper-relevant personalization possible. This is due to the fact that a CDP has the capability to integrate all customer data, using matching technology, and unify customer profiles across systems.

What trends are you excited about in the e-commerce personalization space as we head into 2020?

MTA: Thank you for those super-useful tips on personalization and retail CX strategies, Meyar! We hope to talk with you again, soon!

About Meyar Sheik:

Meyar Sheik is the CEO and Co-Founder of Certona. He is a seasoned software industry executive with 25 years of experience. Since 2000, Meyar has been a web analytics pioneer working with some of the largest sites on the Internet such as Staples, ESPN, Fox, Sony, Best Buy, Disney, CBS, etc., in the areas of web analytics, personalization, and real-time content optimization. Prior to Certona, Meyar was the CMO and COO of web analytics leader, WebSideStory (now part of Omniture/Adobe). Meyar has a BS in Electrical Engineering from New York Institute of Technology and an MBA from Rochester Institute of Technology.

About Certona:

Certona, the leading real-time omnichannel personalization solution, and pioneer of AI-driven experience individualization powers 73 billion unique experiences each month. Trusted by more than 600 brands in over 70 countries, Certona’s patented technology leverages machine learning and predictive analytics to deliver a fully-orchestrated experience with optimized content and messaging to increase engagement and conversions across all customer touchpoints. For more information, please visit, www.certona.com.